We live in a world that is more awash with distraction than ever before. Our attention is constantly vied for by social media, email, advertising in all its myriad forms, 24-hour rolling news, an infinity of YouTube videos, Netflix series, and even old-school media forms such as newspapers, television and books.

We wade through a thick soup of potential distraction. It is no wonder that our attention spans have never been shorter. Or that most of us are suffering due to a chronic inability to concentrate on one task for any significant length of time.

Getting high quality, important and valuable work done depends on our being able to concentrate. Creating and learning require focus. Having our attention constantly stolen by cleverly designed distractions is reducing our ability to do good work.

Deep Work – Cal Newport | Catapult Your Success

In Cal Newport’s excellent book Deep Work, he explains the reasons so many of us are afflicted by short attention spans in the modern world. He also explains why this is such a tragic state of affairs.

Your attention is obviously valuable to you. It allows you to focus, learn and get important work done. But your attention is also seriously valuable to advertisers and content creators. Your attention is worth big bucks to media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, and advertisers of all types.

There is a war raging. And the prize being fought for is your attention. The enemy has an almighty arsenal. And in the case of most human beings, the enemy is winning.

The majority of people are glued to their smartphones, hopelessly addicted to social media, transfixed and thoroughly at the mercy of intelligent advertising campaigns, trapped in a vicious cycle of neverending YouTube and Netflix content.

The tragedy of being constantly distracted and not having the ability to do deep work is that we never reach our potential. We are trapped in mediocrity (at best). We are mindless herd-cattle susceptible to endless manipulation that makes us act against our own best interests (at worst).

Our ability to do deep work is something we can build up over time. Social media is so shallow that most of us have been conditioned to have very short attention spans. But we can build up our attention spans to the point where we can work deeply for hours at a time.